1105
engravings to cheap wood cuts used a loose prints or
to illustrate cheap such as the Penny Magazine, fi rst
published in 1831, that produced ‘a revolution in popular
Art throughout the World.
Both Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851)
and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) appreciated
the importance of reproducing works of art (includ-
ing paintings, drawings, engravings, sculpture and
decorative art) not only for proof of their respective
photographic processes but also for their commercial
application. Subsequently, during the 19th century
art reproduction was to form a key and commercially
very signifi cant part of the photographic market. Until
the 1870s, the photography of works of art (including
paintings) was considered a standard advertised service
offered by commercial photographers.
At the time of photography’s invention a plethora
of reprographic processes were available and by 1859
William John Stannard listed no less than 156 in his
privately published Art Exemplar. These relief pla-
nographic processes were being exploited to meet the
rising demand for loose graphic reproductions and the
business opportunities offered by rapidly expanding
and diversifying commercial markets. Throughout the
19th century, photography was to compete and interact
with manual reprographic processes in the reproduction
of paintings. Indeed this forms a signifi cant part of the
history of photography during the 19th centuy.
During the 1840s a variety of amateurs used the
Daguerreotype to document paintings in their collec-
tions though the scale and scope may never be known.
In parallel, commercial photography was being used
to document public collections—or collections open
to the public. In February 1848, Richard Beard, a lead-
ing London photographer, had been given permission
to Daguerreotype paintings in the National Gallery in
London and a month later a certain John Woolley asked
‘permission to make copies of two or three pictures in
this gallery by means of the Calotype Camera.’ Such
small but signifi cant activities were being undertaken in
many countries.
It is also known that during the 1840s leading art-
ists had their paintings photographed. Jean-Auguste-
Dominque Ingres (1780–67) was one of the earliest
acclaimed contemporary painters to apply photography to
document his work. In 1842 he had a Daguerreotype taken
of his painting of Saint Peter destined for Santa Trinita
dei Monti in Rome. This may have been to enable Ingres
to have Daguerreotypes with which to teach his students.
In 1848 Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) Daguerreotyped
the painting Anacréon, Bacchus et l’Amour by Jean-Léon
Gérôme (1824–1904) exhibited at that year’s Salon. In
the 1860s Gérôme developed extremely close professional
relationships with the photographer Robert Bingham
(1825–70), regularly having his paintings photographed
before being sold. Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) ex-
ploited photography to reproduce his paintings and had
commercially available photographs produced of those
paintings that were refused by the 1855 Salon. Photog-
raphers including E. Baldus, P.A. Richebourg, E. Carjat
and C. Michelez all registered photographs of paintings
by Courbet at the Dépôt legal in Paris.PHOTOGRAPHY OF PAINTINGS
Unknown (Photographer).
Galerie Anglaise.
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles © The J. Paul
Getty Museum.